Three months after the board hearing, Mercy General settled our lawsuit for $1.8 million. The number made headlines, but the money mattered less to me than what came with it. The hospital agreed to implement new emergency department assessment protocols for abdominal pain and other high-risk presentations. They established mandatory bias training for all clinical staff. They created a patient advocate position specifically tasked with addressing complaints of inadequate care in real time rather than after discharge. Two administrators involved in burying prior complaints were quietly terminated. Six other patients harmed by Vance filed their own lawsuits and complaints. Mercy General settled those too. Some reforms arrived because the hospital had grown a conscience, but more arrived because scandal had finally made decency cheaper than denial.